六㆕

Today is the 19th anniversary of the Tianamen Square confrontation between the Chinese students and other Chinese citizens and the Chinese government. Just as Americans say 9-11 to signify the day of the Twin Towers attack, the Chinese say Liu Si or 6 六 - 4㆕. You can hear the two numbers in the audio.

6-4 Mandarin by AKRaven

The students I had in graduate class in 2004 mostly didn't know a lot about what happened on June 4, 1989.

OF ALL the taboos in modern China, the violent quelling of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests on June 4, 1989, remains the most sensitive.

Nineteen years later, China is now the world's fourth-largest economy, and proud host of this year's Olympic Games. But unlike other touchy subjects - Tibet, Taiwan and the Falun Gong group banned as a cult - there is no public discourse on the Tiananmen Square "incident". The real death toll is a state secret; more than a dozen protesters from that time, plus hundreds more dissidents, are in jail. (From today's Sydney Morning Herald)

I arrived in Hong Kong in 1989 about a month after June 4 and during the year I taught at Chinese University I heard a lot about what happened, including a first hand account by one of my colleagues who had been doing research in Beijing during the events. Of course, any individual's accounts are limited by where he was and what he saw.

In any case, I did want to note the day. You can see the Chinese characters for the numbers at AskAsia. This link will take you the character 一 (can you guess?) 1. There you can listen to someone say the character and then go on to the other numbers. I copied their recordings of six and four and mixed them on Jamglue for the audio. Thus it doesn't sound exactly right, but it's better than if I tried to say it. The Chinese have hand signs for the numbers and I'm sure you can figure out what the two at the top stand for. You can see the rest at Chinese-Tools.com.